Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 64

Today we take it for granted that we travel around the world to admire the monuments of the past. We prepare for such trips by reading about what we are going to see, set out on the journey with a good idea of how we will get there and where we will stay, and have a sense of what we will encounter on location. Cyriacus of Ancona (1391-1452), the first cultural tourist since antiquity, lacked these advantages when, in the first half of the 15th century, he sailed around the Mediterranean in search of the remains of Greek and Roman civilisations. Cyriacus first became fascinated by ancient monuments while walking in his home city Ancona and looking at the marble arch, erected in AD 115, to the Roman Emperor Trajan. He suddenly saw the culture in a new light. He no longer saw it as just a familiar and generally overlooked landmark, but as a doorway to the wonders of ancient imperial Rome. Not many people of Cyriacus’s time were interested in historical travel; they generally ignored old buildings and structures, or worse, dismantled them for their building materials. Cyriacus decided to see the world for himself and to record details of whatever other antiquities remained to be discovered. His training as a merchant did not prepare him for this vocation; he did not know ancient languages, history or art. However, he set out to solve these failings, first by learning Latin at the age of 30 and then adding ancient Greek. Having done this, he then set off on voyages around the Mediterranean to find, investigate and understand ancient cultures from their buildings, sculptures and inscriptions. Thus he became the first archaeologist and cultural tourist, predating other antiquarians by some 200 years. Travel in the 15th century, however, was anything but simple or enjoyable. Overland journeys by foot or mule along bad roads, under constant threat from bandits, were bad; voyages by sea were even worse. When the weather cooperated, sailing went relatively smoothly: ships proceeded along coasts from one recognisable landmark to another. However, when there was no wind, the ship did not move. Strong winds were no friends either; they drenched the ship with lashing waves and blew it off course. Water swamped the deck, splashed into the cabins and soaked mattresses, clothes and food. Remarkably, Cyriacus never complained about the miseries of travel. Optimistic by nature, he endured such hardships unafraid and saw opportunities where other people saw setbacks. Among many of the important records made by Cyriacus was his crucial documenting, in 1431, of the remains of Cyzicus, an ancient Roman city that had relied on commerce for its financial success. He hired a local person to take him to the site and then had to work out for himself the significance of the ruins he was looking at because there was no guidebook on ancient architecture to help him. Indeed, he had no contemporary knowledge about the ruins. Cyzicus had been a splendid city in its prime. Unfortunately, the area was highly seismic and in AD 123 the city was so devastated by a major earthquake that, when the Roman Emperor Hadrian visited it the following year, he was so saddened that he decided to subsidise a campaign to reconstruct Cyzicus. He made a substantial donation for a new temple to the Roman god Jupiter. Cyriacus thought the ruined city was awe-inspiring. He found the remains of the temple and examined it in great detail, looking for clues in ancient texts to help him understand what he was seeing. He sketched the great doorway adorned with carved foliage and mythological characters. Cyriacus’s account of this temple is the only record of this building, as in the following centuries it was entirely stripped of all its stonework and all that remains is its base. Cyriacus also visited mainland Greece, in 1436, when no one went to Greece in order to see the country’s ancient ruins. One of his destinations was the sanctuary of Delphi. The ancient Greeks considered Delphi as being situated in the most beautiful spot in Greece. When Cyriacus arrived at the site of Delphi, however, he found war, earthquakes and avalanches had all but obliterated its ruins. Determined to find any ancient traces, Cyriacus spent six days walking all over the area, peering at odd stone blocks sticking out of the ground, running his hands over inscriptions to trace fragments of words, and trying to puzzle out the few surviving structural remains. Climbing uphill towards the rocks that tower over the site, he came upon a theatre built into the slope. Soon after his visit, the site was buried by a rockslide and was not seen again until archaeologists began to excavate the area systematically in the late 19th century. Cyriacus had hoped to visit Egypt and Ethiopia, but he never got there. However, in his life he did record for posterity countless ancient monuments around the Mediterranean, paving the way for future archaeologists and cultural tourists.

With a quarter of the world’s plants set to vanish within the next 50 years, Dough Alexander reports on the scientists working against the clock to preserve the Earth’s botanical heritage. They travel the four corners of the globe, scouring jungles, forests and savannas. But they’re not looking for ancient artefacts, lost treasure or undiscovered tombs. Just pods. It may lack the romantic allure of archaeology or the whiff of danger that accompanies going after big game, but seed hunting is an increasingly serious business. Some seek seeds for profit—hunters in the employ of biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical companies and private corporations on the lookout for species that will yield the drugs or crops of the future. Others collect to conserve, working to halt the sad slide into extinction facing so many plant species. Among the pioneers of this botanical treasure hunt was John Tradescant, an English royal gardener who brought back plants and seeds from his journeys abroad in the early 1600s. Later, the English botanist Sir Joseph Banks—who was the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and travelled with Captain James Cook on his voyages near the end of the 18th century—was so driven to expand his collections that he sent botanists around the world at his own expense. Those heady days of exploration and discovery may be over, but they have been replaced by a pressing need to preserve our natural history for the future. This modern mission drives hunters such as Dr Michiel van Slageren, a good-natured Dutchman who often sports a wide-brimmed hat in the field—he could easily be mistaken for the cinematic hero Indiana Jones. He and three other seed hunters work at the Millennium Seed Bank, an 80 million [pounds sterling] international conservation project that aims to protect the world’s most endangered wild plant species. The group’s headquarters are in a modern glass-and-concrete structure on a 200-hectare Estate at Wakehurst Place in the West Sussex countryside. Within its underground vaults are 260 million dried seeds from 122 countries, all stored at -20 Celsius to survive for centuries. Among the 5,100 species represented are virtually all of Britain’s 1,400 native seed-bearing plants, the most complete such collection of any country’s flora. Overseen by the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank is the world’s largest wild-plant depository. It aims to collect 24,000 species by 2010. The reason is simple: thanks to humanity’s effort, an estimated 25 per cent of the world’s plants are on the verge of extinction and may vanish within 50 years. We’re currently responsible for habitat destruction on an unprecedented scale, and during the past 400 years, plant species extinction rates have been about 70 times greater than those indicated by the geological record as being ‘normal’. Experts predict that during the next 50 years further one billion hectares of wilderness will be converted to farmland in developing countries alone. The implications of this loss are enormous. Besides providing staple food crops, plants are a source of many machines and the principal supply of fuel and building materials in many parts of the world. They also protect soil and help regulate the climate. Yet, across the globe, plant species are being driven to extinction before their potential benefits are discovered. The World Conservation Union has listed 5,714 threatened species is sure to be much higher. In the UK alone, 300 wild plant species are classified as endangered. The Millennium Seed Bank aims to ensure that even if a plant becomes extinct in the wild, it won’t be lost forever. Stored seeds can be used to help restore damaged or destroyed environments or in scientific research to find new benefits for society—in medicine, agriculture or local industry—that would otherwise be lost. Seed banks are an insurance policy to protect the world’s plant heritage for the future, explains Dr Paul Smith, another Kew seed hunter. “Seed conservation techniques were originally developed by farmers,” he says. “Storage is the basis of what we do, conserving seeds until you can use them just as in farming.” Smith says there’s no reason why any plant species should become extinct, given today’s technology. But he admits that the biggest challenge is finding, naming and categorizing all the world’s plants. And someone has to gather these seeds before it’s too late. “There aren’t a lot of people out there doing this,” he says. “The key is to know the flora from a particular area, and that knowledge takes years to acquire.” There are about 1,470 seed banks scattered around the globe, with a combined total of 5.4 million samples, of which perhaps two million are distinct non-duplicates. Most preserve genetic material for agricultural use in order to ensure crop diversity; others aim to conserve wild species, although only 15 per cent of all banked plants is wild. Many seed banks are themselves under threat due to a lack of funds. Last year, Imperial College, London, examined crop collections from 151 countries and found that while the number of plant samples had increased in two-thirds of the countries, the budget had been cut in a quarter and remained static in another 35 per cent. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research has since set up the Global Conservation Trust, which aims to raise the US $260 million to protect seed banks in perpetuity.

Today, the National Trust in the UK administers hundreds of public gardens, while sixty-odd years ago there was only one, Hidcote Manor near the English village of Chipping Campden. In 1949 Hidcote attracted a mere 600 visitors and took all of £30 during its first public season. Nowadays, Hidcote is famous worldwide as a masterpiece of design and planting, attracting 150,000 visitors and raising nearly £1 million from entrance tickets annually. Hidcote Garden was the creation of an American in Britain, the shy Major Lawrence Johnston, who came to live on the site in 1907 with his widowed mother, Gertrude Winthrop. In some respects Winthrop feared her son's talents for expensive landscape gardening and never allowed him full access to the family's funds. Nonetheless, with her inspiration and guidance Johnston started his design in 1908 and brought it to a peak in the early 1930s when he was in his 60s. He may rightly be ranked at this time beside Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, creators of Sissinghurst, his garden's only surviving equal. Graham Thomas was tasked with reviving Hidcote, and he had to manage without these crucial documents. Thomas knew that for the gardens to be a commercial success he needed to extend those areas that were of most interest to the general public, so he introduced new plants and a Mediterranean Bank where Johnston had had nothing of the sort, while retaining the existing superb structure of avenues and evergreen rooms. As a result, since 1949, the visiting public has innocently been admiring Thomas's flower plantings, not Johnston's own. When the important designer Russell Page had visited Hidcote in 1934 he had hailed the half-hardy plants in the summer house as one of the highlights. But Thomas later got rid of them and pulled the house down, fearing such relatively colourless exhibits would not capture the public's imagination. Then, in 2002, Johnston's old diaries and notebooks resurfaced. The present head gardener had started to give lectures about Hidcote's lost early designs, during which he appealed for memories from his audience. A few months later, a woman approached him with a box of papers she had found in her attic. They were the missing records, including Johnston’s original planting lists and detailed sketches. This discovery prompted a major reassessment of the garden's history. Curators could now distinguish between Johnston’s original vision and the later modifications. A debate began on whether to restore parts of the garden to its 1930s heyday, a complex project that would involve removing some of Thomas's popular additions. The diaries also revealed Johnston’s meticulous notes on plant sourcing from his expeditions to China and South Africa, highlighting his dedication and global influence. This find has allowed historians to fully appreciate the depth of Johnston’s genius, which had been partially obscured for over half a century.